My experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

While many odd behaviors of young children are dismissed as just “kids are weird,” my OCD symptoms were severe enough to be readily obvious to even an uninformed observer, and my diagnosis soon followed. Before getting into the individual behaviors, however, it’s important to understand the compulsions that drive them. Imagine the urge to scratch a mosquito bite; you’ll often reach for it without thinking, and once you’re aware of it, the urge to scratch it grows stronger and stronger. There’s a momentary relief if you give in, but the itching will soon surge back more potent than before. If you resist it for long enough it subsides, but it’s still there waiting for you the next time an instigating event brings it back. Explaining how this applies to every OCD symptom I’ve ever suffered would be a tedious list, so I’ll stick with the ones that caused me the most problems when I was a kid.

Whenever I spoke, I had a certain idea in my head of how the sentence should sound, but no matter how I said it, the words always came out wrong. I would repeat the “wrong” part, but each little change was somehow not right, and would be either an over or under adjustment to the ever-changing ideal of what it was supposed to be. Because of how much this impacted my speech and drew negative attention, I often forced it down and stopped speaking after one or two instances, leaving me with the enflamed mental mosquito bite; it had been scratched, and it demanded more. If I had said something to myself when no one else was within earshot, it could get out of control; without social embarrassment to cut it short, I could end up repeating the word over a dozen times, making the compulsion worse and worse until the passive discomfort, even while complying, exceeded what the discomfort used to be while resisting it. I would eventually stop, and then suffer through the increased duration of the compulsion winding down.

Whenever I had physical contact with anything, but especially with my hands or feet, I would feel that I needed to “balance” it by doing the same on the other side. These balancing touches were in vain, because it then felt out of balance the other way; if I touched a doorknob with my right hand, then I needed to do the same with my left hand, but now the left has touched it more recently and so the right feels out of balance, so I touch it again with the right, but now the left is out of balance, and so on. I once ruined a pair of shoes in just a couple weeks from repeatedly scuffing their outer edges on the ground with each step, trying to balance the first accidental scuff indefinitely. Just like with the repeating words compulsion, it was an impossible mark to hit, and I would have to eventually force a stop to the behavior and suffer through however much I had enflamed the mental mosquito bite.

The symptom that caused me the most stress was compulsive movements. I would feel the need to twitch my head, roll my wrist, clench my jaw, or do some other kind of motion in a certain way. As with the others, the “correct” way of doing the motion was an ever-shifting goal that could never be achieved. The insidious side of this symptom was that it was so much easier to accidentally trigger than the others; speaking and interacting with objects are generally conscious decisions, but small movements occur without thinking far more often, allowing the mental mosquito bite to build up scratches before being noticed, and then enforce its demands with far greater authority. Because these movements could be completed faster than other compulsions, they also spiraled out of control faster, racking up more scratches and raising the threshold of willpower needed to resist.

As I got older, my control of my OCD improved. I attained a better understanding of what triggered the compulsions, and I managed to go longer and longer stretches of time without giving in, allowing the mental mosquito bites to lose strength. This progress could be quickly eroded, however; even just writing this article has brought the compulsions to the front of my mind, and I’ve had to stop typing several times to clear my head and get them back under control. Other times when I’ve had more serious regressions, it took all day to get back to my baseline feeling. OCD is the sort of thing that never really goes away; it’s a constant fight with your own mind that can be managed, but never won.

The final issue I’ll close with isn’t a symptom of OCD itself, but the frustration I’ve had from common misunderstandings of it. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard someone say they think they have OCD because they like to keep their desk tidy, or because they keep a disciplined schedule, or some other minor quirk that they equate to a debilitating mental condition. It’s like hearing “A bear bit your foot off? I know what that’s like, I broke my toe once.” I’m then left with the choice of saying a simple “it’s not like that, trust me,” or trying to get them to listen to a several minute explanation. I hope that publishing this can prevent a few of those situations going forward, or if not, that it will at least give me a ready-made explanation to email someone if I’m not feeling up to the emotional labor of explaining OCD for the thousandth time.

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This article was written as part of the first issue of Divergent Thinking Magazine, a publication comprised of neurodivergent authors writing about their experiences. You can download the full version on Etsy.